


there will be another number (for the one who had a name)

by clareironbrook



Series: [tribute name here] (portal/hunger games) [1]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-09-17 00:46:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9296837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clareironbrook/pseuds/clareironbrook
Summary: Children in District Three learned from a young age that this part of the country now called Panem had always been known for science and industry, as a center of innovation. Nothing grew in Three, where every building was poured grey concrete and white cinderblock factories, and the sky was a persistent dirty haze that blotted out the sun.Chell was sixteen and had always known how she would die- working in the factories like her parents. She didn’t even want to work in the labs- never seeing the sun all her life would be worse than death.And then, that summer, they pulled her name out of the glass ball in the District square.A Portal Hunger Games AU.





	1. chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _...tomorrow there will be another number, for the one who had a name_   
>  _a desert wind and a perverse desire to win, history buried in shame_   
>  _the thunder and the laughter, the last thing they remember..._   
>  _\- stars, 'celebration guns'_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> thanks to @silverstreams for giving feedback!

Children in District Three learned from a young age that this part of the country now called Panem had always been known for science and industry, as a center of innovation. _Michigan_ , this area had once been called. _Detroit_ , a place by the far-off lake that now separated them from District Six. 

There had also been farming here, but all that remained of that was the fields of golden grass outside the fence- only outside, because nothing grew in Three, where every building was poured grey concrete and white cinderblock factories, and the sky was a persistent dirty haze that blotted out the sun. Three’s industry was technology, and most of the citizens worked on the assembly lines, making electronics for the Capitol.

A local legend was that there had also been a mine here, long ago, like the mines in Twelve. Whether or not it had once been a mine, there was another half of Three underground- the laboratories, where the brightest minds in Three were picked to do research for the Capitol- under miles of concrete, to ‘protect the populace.’ 

(People made a game of guessing what it was they did. Mutts? An open secret. Engineering the Arenas? Likely. Human experiments? Not above the Capitol. Needless to say, the game was played in secret.)

Of course, it was the populace aboveground who died of slow poisoning from the factory chemicals- nothing grew in Three, not even the people- and the ones underground who stayed healthy, got better housing, and their children never had to take out tesserae.

Factory workers’ children were usually the ones to be Reaped- the ones that lived that long. 

Chell was sixteen and had always known how she would die. Her parents had died when she was young, working in the factories, and she expected to do the same. When she turned eighteen, she would get her assignment, and it wouldn’t be in the labs. She was only adequate in school, if only because she never paid attention. What was the point? She didn’t even want to work in the labs- never seeing the sun all her life would be worse than death.

Sometimes she took the long way from school back to the Community Home to linger by the fence- she’d carefully timed it so she could stand there for nearly ten minutes before the Peacekeeper rotation. In the distance, there was grass and sunshine. 

And then, that summer, on a rare day when the sun burned through the smog, they pulled her name out of the glass ball in the District square.

 

*

 

Three’s single living Victor arrived on the train shortly after Chell and the boy tribute had been escorted there. He had won his Games two years before Chell was born- meaning Three hadn’t had a single Victor in sixteen years.

He was in his thirties, tall and thin like most men in Three, except he was so tall he had to duck under the door of the train car to get in. 

“Hello!” he said, with a sort of forced, manic enthusiasm. “Nice to meet you both- I mean, not ‘nice’ given the circumstances...but that’s not your fault! I’m Wheatley, you probably know that already-”

In stark contrast, Three’s Capitol escort was a big, brash man with wide shoulders and a perpetual cocky grin. He clapped Wheatley on the shoulders from behind as he boarded the car- Wheatley buckled a little under the force of his giant hands.

“So!” he said jovially. “Another year! How’s this year’s crop of tributes look to you?”

“-Rick,” choked Wheatley. Rick pushed past him like a revolving door.

“Well,” he said to Chell and the boy, “we don’t need introducing-” (this was true, they knew him perfectly well from the Reaping every year, plus the ride from the Justice Building) “-but it’s my job to get you where you’re going and keep you happy. Everything on the train is for you, and we’ll be in the Capitol tomorrow afternoon.”

When neither of them mustered enthusiasm, Rick chuckled. 

“You’re going on an adventure!” he said. “Try to enjoy it a little!”

Rick left the car. Wheatley was twisting his fingers in his hands.

“Sorry about, er, him,” he stammered. “You know. He’s a Capitol type. He’s...not so bad when you get to know him.”

(Given that Rick had just described the week before their certain deaths as ‘an adventure,’ Chell was fairly certain she didn’t want to spend any of her remaining time getting to know him.)

“Er, well, anyway, we’ll have dinner in a bit, if you want it. And you each have a room,” continued Wheatley.

After a few more babbled explanations, he fled the car (again, ducking to get through the door). Chell almost felt sorry for him- and then she remembered where she was.

The boy, in the seat to Chell’s left, didn’t make to move, just twisted to face the window wordlessly. Chell didn’t leave either. She wasn’t hungry, and didn’t care to see whatever room the Capitol had set up on the train for her. They sat there together, in silence.

She didn’t know him, which didn’t mean much- she mostly kept to herself at school and her only friends were the other Community Home kids. He was small, lanky, about fifteen, with a mess of dark hair.

She did know his name, from the Reaping. His name was Douglas Rattmann.

 

*

 

Wheatley did manage to warn them about Remake, over breakfast the next morning, and told them not to fight the prep teams; Chell was grateful for that, at least, because she might have started swinging when they pinned her to a table and tried to take her clothes.

For hours, they cleaned every last inch of her, divested her of every last body hair, soaked and scrubbed her hands and feet, even cut her hair. Finally, they left her alone.

Her stylist was a man named Craig, who, to her relief, was the most normal-looking person she’d met in the Capitol so far, apart from his bright pink eyes. He was calm and matter-of-fact, and a little bit eccentric- he went off on tangents explaining the sewing techniques he’d used in her wardrobe, none of which she understood. But he wasn’t unkind, and he treated her more like a person than the prep team.

She was still a little bit scared of what the costumes he invented were going to look like. Almost all the Tribute Parade costumes, every year, were horrible. The tributes from Three were usually just covered in metallics. Craig seemed to have put slightly more thought into it, but it didn’t seem much better than usual. 

Chell and Doug had both been given skintight white jumpsuits, and then a kind of armor had been fitted around them, panels of glossy white segmented down their arms and legs, boxy in the chest. Their makeup had been done with silver accents. Chell was given a headband with an antenna.

“We’re robots,” Doug said, after Craig and the prep team had left them in the chariot to wait. Chell’s bewilderment must have been showing on her face. It was also the first thing he had said to her out loud. “Capitol people have stories about robots that look and think like people. They probably think we make them at home.”

Chell didn’t know what to make of that. She knew what a robot was- like the mechanical arms that helped assemble electronics in the factories, doing detailed work faster than could be done by hand. It did what it was programmed to do. How would you- or why would you want to?- make one that thought for itself? The Capitol wasn’t above making a living thing- like mutts. But she didn’t see the purpose in making a robot into a person.

She was still thinking about it when they opened the doors to the bright city above them and they started to move. The long, wide street to the City Circle was crowded with people. Chell found herself looking up, at the glittering buildings turned candy-colored in the sunset. 

The City Circle was lit up like daytime. Standing at a podium high above them was the President- a thin woman with long, white hair. Chell caught her expressionless gaze for a moment, or thought she did, and felt ice down her spine.

The final chariots rolled in behind them and the crowd fell silent. The President gave the usual speech- thanking the tributes for their courage and sacrifice, may the odds be ever in their favor. 

Chell caught Doug staring at the President as well, and felt sure his ashen, terrified face mirrored her own.

 

*

 

Chell didn’t sleep well, even with- or maybe because of- the enormous Capitol dinner and her luxurious Training Center room. She kept having nightmares of assembly-line robots chasing her down and killing her with long silver claws, while the President dispassionately watched.

She got up sometime after dawn, dressed- her outfit laid out for her while she slept, simple gray pants and a shirt with the number 3 on it- tied her hair back as she always did, and stumbled down to breakfast. The spread was already laid out, and- to her surprise- someone was already there, sitting at the table and spreading something on his toast.

“Oh! ‘Morning,” Wheatley greeted her when he noticed her on the stairs. “Come on and get a bite to eat.”

Chell took a plate, filled it with eggs, thick bacon, and fruit, and sat down across from Wheatley. She wasn’t sure why he made her nervous. The man was hopelessly awkward, but he was a Victor. There had to be something more to him than he appeared that had once gotten him through a Hunger Games. 

“So,” Wheatley said, after they’d eaten in silence for awhile. “First training day, that’s today. Exciting.”

She gave him a shrug in response, eating her fruit.

“You know, my job as your mentor is to, er, give you pointers, as it were,” he said. “So, if there’s any particular strengths you’ve already got, I can tell you what to look at downstairs. And it’ll help me later, when I talk to the sponsors.” He made a face. “Badgering old Capitol ladies for money. Eesh.”

Chell didn’t really know what she had to share- she didn’t really want to share anything about herself with the Capitol- but if he needed it to try to help her, she had to come up with something.

“Um...I was always good at running,” she said. “In school, when we did the physical fitness tests.”

Wheatley smiled and nodded, and then grimaced. 

“Ooh, I was always terrible at those. You think I’d be good, with these legs, but I tripped all over myself.”

Chell suppressed a laugh at the mental picture. 

“I’m...not really good at anything else.”

“No, that’s brilliant, that’s...really half the job done, if you can run away from everyone else, honestly,” he said, suddenly pensive.

He took a roll from the basket on the table. Chell noticed that they were small and square, white flour- District Three bread. She took one too, as he broke his open and spooned fruit preserves into it. He winked at her as he shoved his into his mouth whole. 

Rick escorted Chell and Doug downstairs to the Training Center gym at ten, talking the whole time about his proficiency with various exotic weapons, and if they’d only let him in the gym they’d give the tributes a good demonstration. About half the tributes were already gathered when they walked in. Once everyone had arrived, they were released to the various stations scattered around the gym.

Wheatley had advised them both, in a short meeting before they left with Rick, to spend time at the wilderness survival stations, since their experience with nature in Three was even slimmer (meaning nearly nonexistent) than most districts. After a variety of those- fire starting, knot tying- Chell was sure she would never master them in time for the Arena.

After lunch, Chell split off on her own. With some trepidation, she let the trainers guide her through the basics of a few weapons. They told her ranged weapons would suit her best, “because of her size”- they didn’t say she was scrawny and underfed, like most of the tributes, but she was small for her age, and a hand-to-hand fight would probably not work out in her favor. They showed her a few ways to disarm or dislodge an opponent, just in case, and then throwing knives, and then a bow and arrow.

There were three days of training. Chell and Doug started the days together, practicing the wilderness skills- which Chell got no better at, but Doug seemed to pick up on- and Chell used the rest of her time practicing with the weapons and the various agility exercises. She knew perfectly well that her best chance in the Arena (and it wasn’t much of one) would be to hide and to run- if she had to fight (and they would make her fight) she was probably going to lose. 

She kept practicing anyway. She felt better knowing she wasn’t walking in completely unprepared, and it kept her mind busy. By the end, she was hitting more targets than she would have expected from just a few days’ practice.

The last day ended in individual assessments. District Three had the good fortune of going early, before the Gamemakers got bored or tired, but the bad fortune of going directly after One and Two. Chell and Doug sat together, in silence, until he was called, and then it was her turn.

The broadcast of the scores was that night, after dinner. Chell got an eight; Doug got a four. She didn’t ask him what he did in his session, and neither did he. 

 

*

 

The last night before the Arena was the interviews, and they spent two days in preparation. 

Rick’s job was teaching them how to carry themselves gracefully in front of the Capitol audience, which was laughable, since Chell’s training with him mostly amounted to him giving her a pair of high heels (which she had never worn in her life) and ordering her to run laps around the apartment. It was almost like an extra day of agility training; if she hadn’t felt comfortable walking on tip-toe for hours before, she was now, and at least she was sure she wouldn’t trip on stage.

She would have rather done that again than Wheatley’s session- what she was supposed to say. Chell barely spoke, by habit, and never about herself- and she had to do it for three minutes straight, in front of the entire country. Not only that, but she had to make them like her.

“It’s just an impression they want,” Wheatley told her. “The Careers’ll go for sexy or tough, always do. Everyone else just does well to be interesting, to be honest.”

Chell grimaced, sitting in a chair across from him, still wearing the high heels. 

“There’s nothing interesting about me,” she said. 

Wheatley scooted his chair a few inches closer, giving her an apologetic smile. 

“Listen, you know what the important thing is? You just show them you’re smart. The people that matter, that’s what they want to see, that you’re smart.”

“So I’ll be more entertaining before I die?” she retorted, making Wheatley frown. She knew she wasn’t making his job any easier, and he was her best ally here, but the more time Chell spent in the Capitol, the more frustrated she felt. She hadn’t had a future in the first place, and now they were going to take even that away- instead of letting her die quietly in the factories, she was going to die on television in front of thousands.

Wheatley had been consulting a small electronic tablet; whatever he was reading was making him even jumpier than usual. He paced for a minute, then sat back down.

“I know you’re smart, love,” he said, “because you got a higher training score than any Three tribute in…in a long time.” He paused, then added, “Including me.”

He didn’t have to remind her that all those other tributes were dead. That he had mentored and didn’t bring home, she remembered.

“Remember what I said about sponsors?” he said. “Well- laying my cards on the table here- this might mean I could actually get you some. If I can tell them what you did in training. Which they don’t actually tell me.”

“I…wasn’t very good at the wilderness stuff,” she said, “so I learned a couple of weapons. Knives, and a bow. And I practiced the agility course. That’s what I showed them.”

Wheatley seemed to consider this carefully.

“Well, like I told you before,” he said, “if you can run, that’s half the job taken care of, and we’ll see about the rest.”

Craig put Chell in a dress made of sky blue silk (the same color as the sliver of sky she could see in the distance from the District fence, not that he knew that) and silver jewelry that looked like braided wire. Her hair was shinier than it had ever been, down and brushing her shoulders. 

She got up on stage without tripping, and managed to keep breathing as she walked up to the chair in front of five thousand Capitolites and all of Panem. The interviewer, Gregarius Clark, had had the job all Chell’s life. He was nice enough, and gave her easy questions to answer, and the audience laughed at his jokes. When she was done, she didn’t feel like she’d been particularly memorable, but she’d gotten through.

One and Two went before her, charming and deadly as always. Doug went after her, in a grey suit and a tie that matched her dress, stumbling and uncooperative. Four, the other Career district, was after them, and then it mostly got worse from there.

The boy from Five was a smart aleck. The boy from Twelve was barely bothering to hide his anger; the interviewer had to run circles around him to keep him contained. Everyone in between was barely coherent- scared kids who were about to die and knew it. 

Six had the youngest tribute this year, a tiny twelve-year-old girl, whose stylist had put her in a frilly yellow dress that just made her look younger. She said, in a small, polite voice, that she wished she had more time to learn about the Capitol. Chell remembered her going frantically from one training station to another, trying to learn everything.

There wasn’t much left to do after the interviews. Chell and Doug sat with Wheatley and Rick and watched the pre-Games coverage on television, until its end signaled their time to go to bed. 

Sleeping was hopeless. Chell knew she needed it, to be rested for the Arena, but the adrenaline in her body wouldn’t fade. She thought about District Three, and how bleak life had been there, her eventual death like a shadow following her around. At least she’d expected to have a few decades before that- now every passing minute felt like it was slipping through her fingers. At least she’d get to breathe clean air in the Arena, for however long she had, and it would be faster than choking on factory fumes.

She tossed and turned for hours before she finally got up, slipping down the hall and towards the stairs. A glass of water would help, or at least distract her mind for a few minutes- and she needed all the hydration she could get, while she could still get it. 

Chell stopped cold at the top of the stairs when she realized she wasn’t alone. There were two people in the darkened sitting room- the lights from the City Center outside, as bright as the night of the tribute parade, illuminated the room through the windows, well enough to see. 

It was Wheatley and Doug, speaking in low tones, too soft for her to hear. She quickly crouched at the corner of the wall, out of sight behind a potted plant, peering through at them.

Doug was curled up in an armchair, facing away from her. She could tell he’d been crying- she could hear the croakiness in his voice, and he kept wiping his face with his hands. 

Wheatley was in a chair across from him- he always looked half-folded into any chair, but he especially looked it now, legs crossed, his chin in his hands, listening to what Doug was saying. It struck Chell that man who seemed to have difficulty keeping himself together on a minute-by-minute basis tried so hard to be there for them. 

She sat in the hall, listening to their indistinct voices, until a Capitol attendant found her and took her back to her room. In the last few hours she had, she finally slept.

 

*

 

The ride to the Arena was early in the morning.

Tributes and Mentors said their goodbyes on the roof. Wheatley, twitchier than ever, shook Chell’s hand, then pulled her into a hug. His spindly arms nearly went all the way around her to meet his body again.

“Take care of yourself, Chell,” he said, quietly. “And...remember what I said. About the running.”

Unable to think of anything to say, she nodded, and gave him a tight smile.

Craig went with her to the launch chamber, under the Arena. There was a sleeveless white shirt, emblazoned with a number 3, and a pair of grey leggings. Over that went a dusty orange jumpsuit- loose-fitting, but obviously Capitol-made to fit her. As soon as Craig zipped it up to her neck she resolved to pull it down as soon as possible. The shoes were sleek slip-on sneakers, with thin rubber soles.

They sat in silence until a voice indicated it was time. Chell willed herself not to shake as she stepped into the tube, which closed around her and began to rise. For a moment, she was in darkness, and then she was pushed out into the light. She knew right off that it wasn’t sunlight- it was bright, but it was cold, bluish light, not warm. And there was no breeze, no feeling like there had ever been breeze. Dead air.

They were indoors, in a huge room. The domed ceiling above was made of tessellating square panels, the room’s illumination coming from behind them. The floor, and the walls, were dark grey concrete. The room made an octagon, with a pair of double doors on every other side, and a second level, with a railing, encircled above. There were no windows she could see.

A tall structure, a platform on long metal legs and wrapped by a thin staircase, occupied the center of the room. The Cornucopia. Crates and bags were piled between the struts, silver weapons shining on top of them, and the best ones would be on the top platform. Scattered around it, closer to the circle of Tributes, were backpacks and other supplies.

The only thing she could think was, _I won’t get to see the sun before I die after all._

The gong sounded, and she ran for the doors without a second thought.


	2. chapter 2 (the arena, part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for Hunger Games-typical violence/death (and one swear).

Outside the Cornucopia, the Arena was a labyrinth of hallways, with checkered tile floor and grey concrete walls. If Chell lived through the day, she would have to remember where she was going, but at the moment she was only thinking about putting as much distance between herself and the Cornucopia as possible.

She ran down hall after hall, terrified that another tribute with a weapon would be around the next corner. Anyone else who made it out would have to be somewhere in there too. 

After what felt like hours of running, she heard the cannon fire begin for the dead at the Cornucopia. She stopped, bracing against a wall to catch her breath, and counted the shots.

They echoed in the small space, ringing in the air when they finished. Eleven. Chell took a breath. Thirteen left. Almost half the tributes gone.

She kept going. The halls were not all the same- some were wide and illuminated, some were narrower and darkened, or had a single light every few yards, like there had been a power failure. Some of the halls were also lined with doors, which led to small, office-like rooms. She’d already started checking them. The unlocked ones were invariably devoid of anything useful- some of them were strewn with debris, some were bare. 

It was almost like an office of some sort- one that had befallen some sort of disaster and been abandoned quickly. The Gamemakers liked to tell stories with their Arenas- and depending on what they had in mind, all bets were off on what might happen. If she could figure out where she was supposed to be, she might be able to stay ahead of them, but right now she didn’t have a clue.

Eventually she stopped, slumping into a dark corner in exhaustion. The jumpsuit was strangling around her neck- she pulled the zipper down, then shrugged the whole upper half off her arms, tying the sleeves around her waist. It wasn’t particularly cold, and she didn’t need protection from the sun, so she’d take better mobility over covering her arms.

The number 3 stood out harshly on her white shirt. That was all she was in here- a number. District Three female. And her odds of winning, which were going up the longer she survived, but the other tributes were surely plotting to cut that short even now.

The sound of the anthem almost made her heart stop. It was impossible to tell day from night here, but that meant it was sundown, when the deaths from the day were recapped, shown to the tributes as portraits in the sky. There was no sky here, of course, which made Chell wonder how they were going to do it- but then the ceiling flickered, in a wave, with tiny points of blue light, which resolved into a matrix overhead. The seal of the Capitol appeared, tiling down the hallway, while the anthem played, unsettlingly, from no particular source.

The faces of the dead started to appear. They started with the girl from Four- which meant Doug was alive, Chell realized. Then the boy from Six, both from Seven, the boy from Eight, the girl from Nine, both from Ten, both from Eleven, and the girl from Twelve. The lights disappeared, leaving the ceiling blank again.

Chell felt a twinge of guilt that she hadn’t looked for Doug at the Cornucopia. But he’d never brought up being allies, or making a plan to stay together. She didn’t know where to find him now, or even if she wanted to. Who else was left? The little girl from Six, surprisingly enough. The rest were unknowns. And the Careers, minus one, which was unusual.

The indoor Arena threw everything off. There hadn’t been one in Chell’s lifetime. Supposedly they were unpopular in the Capitol- not enough action, not enough scenery. It made things go too fast, or not fast enough- either everyone was hunted down in a few days, or it took weeks for most of them to starve. 

She was trying not to think about her worst nightmare seemingly coming true. She hadn’t wanted to work in the labs in Three, underground, away from the sun. The factories were bad enough. Now she was going to die in a dark, windowless place, like a rat in a cage.

She checked down the hall for an unlocked door, and found one- empty, of course, except for a few boxes, a broken chair, and some papers. She closed the door behind her, shoved the debris against the door, and folded herself into the corner. She couldn’t help but immediately fall asleep.

 

*

 

Two days in, and Chell was starting to get desperate.

She had been woken on the first morning by a cannon. She’d started moving quickly after that- if she had had to guess, the Careers would be starting to hunt. Leaving her hiding place put her at risk of running into them, but staying in one place would too.

(The girl from Five’s face appeared, flickering, on the ceiling that night. That was twelve dead. Half the tributes dead- half left.)

There hadn’t been any more deaths since. The indoor Arena would probably be confounding whatever tracking skills the Careers had, but the limited availability of places to hide should have been making it easier for them- unless the Arena was so big that it didn’t matter. If no one died today, the Gamemakers would probably start doing it for them.

The day before, her creeping hunger and thirst had been easier to ignore, but today it was impossible. Her head hurt, and she could feel herself getting sluggish. Another day or so, and it would kill her. Wheatley’s final instructions to her and Doug, before they left to meet the hovercraft, had been not to go to the Cornucopia. She hadn’t had a problem complying before- in that enclosed room, it was even more dangerous. But now, completely lacking supplies, she almost wished she had tried. The only water supply might have even been in the packs at the Cornucopia.

Thinking about her mentor reminded her that Wheatley, himself, should be able to send her water. If he had enough sponsor money- or any at all. Maybe he would, if she were really about to die.

She’d checked every door she’d seen for two days now, and none of the ones that were unlocked contained anything useful. She wondered why they had put locked doors in the Arena at all, if there was no way to use them. Was there a trick to getting inside? Would there even be anything useful inside if she found it? They might even be some kind of Gamemaker trap. 

Chell felt a handle give under her hand, and pushed inward, like clockwork, not expecting anything different. 

She heard it before she saw it- the _crack_ of glass under her shoe. The glass that had once been the translucent pane set into the door, which, when she looked up, was hanging onto the frame in shards. In the silence, the tiny sound seemed thunderous.

There was a table, on its side, shoved into the corner. She heard a deep breath, and then the shadows moved as the room’s massive occupant stood.

Chell spun on her heels and bolted as the boy threw himself at her, a long piece of gleaming metal in his hands.

She barreled down the hall, as fast as her body could carry her. The small part of her brain that wasn’t panicking was remembering what the trainers had said. She didn’t have much of a chance against a tribute bigger than her, with a weapon. If he caught her, she was going to die. 

There was an intersection in the hallway ahead. She weighed her options, each step counting seconds down. Her only chance was to lose him, but turning slowed her down, and she had to have enough time to get inside a room without being seen. And if it was a hallway without doors, she was trapped. She could hear him behind her- too close.

She flew through, saw- out of the corner of her eye- something in the hallway that hadn’t been there before. There was an explosion of sound- she felt the air ripple as something flew past her, but she kept running- and then there was a second report, and she looked back to see a spray of blood and the boy falling where he stood. A cannon sounded.

Chell collapsed to her knees, gasping for breath. Against all odds, the first Gamemaker trap she’d encountered had saved her life. 

As she stood, shakily, and cautiously approached the body, she saw the last of the things that had shot at her and killed him being lifted into an opening in the ceiling, which slid shut behind it. A white, enameled oval, with spindly legs, a bright red lens in the center, like an eye, and apparently, also a gun.

The boy’s blood was starting to puddle on the tile, his shirt labeled 12 staining crimson. He was the one who had been so angry in the interviews. District Twelve- the coal district. It probably wasn’t much brighter in his district than it was in hers, Chell thought. 

She was sorry he was dead, but the backpack on his back might help her live. Pushing back her disgust, she rolled him over and slipped it off his arms. The metal thing he had carried wasn’t a knife, as she had assumed; it was a flat, dull piece of steel, curved and pointed on one end- a crowbar. She picked that up too. 

She moved down the hallway a dozen paces and watched the floor panels descend, lowering the boy’s body out of sight, an identical section rising in its place. There was no sign left that anyone had died there.

She needed to hide now- get out of sight before any other tributes came looking, or the Gamemakers decided they weren’t done with her. She picked a direction and walked, as long as she could stand, before she found an unlocked door (which she opened more carefully). There was a desk inside- the kind with a solid metal back- which she pushed against the door, and then hid under.

Chell had never cried with relief before, but she almost did when she saw the bottle of water and packet of crackers in the pack. She ate and drank slowly, knowing she would need to save it.

She stayed awake just long enough to see the ceiling light up with the boy from 12’s face.

 

*

 

The sound of footsteps outside her room woke Chell up. Not a solitary tribute passing by- several, loud and careless. _Careers_.

She was instantly awake, fear flooding through her. Too late to run. She was still folded under the desk- they wouldn’t be able to see her if they looked in from outside, but if they decided to search the room she would be trapped. 

They stopped close enough that she could hear them talking. She didn’t dare try to look and see.

“Where can they all be fucking hiding? We’ve been running around in circles for three days,” one of the boys said, punctuating his sentence by kicking the wall. Chell pushed down a scream of surprise when she felt the impact through the floor. They were just outside.

“Something’s weird,” agreed one of the girls. 

Chell couldn’t remember their voices well enough to try to guess who was speaking. It didn’t really matter- she was equally dead if any of them found her. 

“There’s just five left, that’s nothing,” another boy said. “We could just let them die on their own at this point.”

“And miss the fun? I don’t think so.” Chell was pretty sure that was the girl from One; she’d sounded particularly ruthless in her interview, and that sounded like her.

“Six Girl’s the _baby_ , how’d she even get away from the bloodbath?” the other girl- Two?- complained. The others concurred with scoffs and groans.

“What about Three Girl?” one of the boys said. Chell sucked in a breath. “How’d you think she got that eight? She didn’t look that smart.”

“She’ll still be an easy kill,” the One girl said casually, making Chell’s blood run cold. “We just have to track her down. Maybe she’s with Three Boy, he’s still alive.”

They finally moved on, their voices echoing away down the hall. Chell couldn’t make herself move from under the desk for what felt like hours, adrenaline holding her to the spot. She had to have been on camera at some point during that encounter; the Careers planning her death, with her just on the other side of the wall, would have been gold. She might still be live now. 

She needed to make a plan and get moving, especially if people were watching. The water and crackers would only last another day or two- finding more had to be her first priority. Chell wrapped a hand around the crowbar. She thought she might know how the 12 boy had gotten it.

One good swing at a glass pane later, and Chell was inside one of the locked rooms. (The sound was horrible, and the mess of broken glass didn’t exactly hide where she’d been. She was going to have to be careful where and how often she did that.) Inside a file cabinet was another bottle of water and some dried meat. She laid low for the rest of the day, taking tiny sips of water and nibbling on her food, trying to keep her strength up. 

Chell slept, got up, and started moving again. It was impossible to actually tell if when she was waking up was ‘morning’ or not- there were no indicators of the time other than the anthem at night. It had been five days since the start of the Games, but it felt like she could have been in there for years.

The only sound in the Arena was the distant rumble of machinery behind the walls, the hum of the air conditioning. The sound Chell heard, when she stopped for a moment in the hall, was something else. A wavering, dissonant tone, almost musical but not quite. And it wasn’t distant- it was close.

She only had to turn another corner to see what it was. Or, rather, she didn’t turn the corner, because the hallway was filled with dozens of glowing red laser beams. They zigzagged from ceiling to floor, effectively blocking the way. The air vibrated with energy, the sound she had heard loud at close range. 

There were lasers in the factories in District Three. Chell knew that people got burns, or lost fingers, getting too close- and these were much bigger. She turned and went back the way she came, uneasily. 

A few hallways later, she was blocked again by another tangle of lasers. Turning again, she started to sprint. She didn’t like this. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw distant hallways lighting up red, denying her anywhere to run but straight ahead.

“Hey!”

Chell stopped in her tracks. She was in an intersection, in the middle of a long hallway. At the other end were all five Careers, armed and angry. 

The Gamemakers were forcing them together- after yesterday’s near-encounter, they wanted a real clash. They wanted the Careers to kill her. She turned to run, but she didn’t get further than a few yards before- to her horror- a wall of lasers activated.

The Careers were almost on top of her. The crowbar in her hand would be useless against their weapons, and they were easily twice her size. Twice her size…

There was a horizontal gap in the lasers at about waist height- not big enough for the average person, but maybe big enough for her. It was crazy, but there was nowhere else to go. She didn’t have time to think about it- she took a running leap, jumped, and threw herself through the gap. She felt the heat, close enough to singe-

She hit the ground hard, rolled- and sat up to see the Careers on the other side of the lasers. The girl from One, in the front, was staring at something on the floor, her face contorted in confusion and anger. Chell realized it was a piece of the orange sleeve of her own jumpsuit- formerly tied around her waist, cleanly burned off by the laser. 

Chell scrambled to her feet, turned, and ran. She wasn’t going to wait around until the Gamemakers turned the lasers off and let them kill her anyway. She was around the corner before she even heard the One girl’s howl of frustration.

“Go around! Don’t lose her!” Chell heard her scream, echoing down the hall. 

Sure enough, minutes later she heard pounding feet behind her again. She chanced a look behind her- it was two of the boys. The Gamemakers obviously weren’t blocking them. Maybe they’d turned all the lasers off- although that still left her with five Careers on her trail.

She turned her eyes back to the hallway ahead- and immediately swerved, nearly smacking her face on the wall. A single, vertical laser had turned on directly in her path, ready to slice her in half. No, they’d just begun to have fun.

Chell kept running as the lasers hummed to life around her, turning the hallway into a deadly obstacle course. She jumped and dodged around them- the lasers came close enough to leave scorch marks on the legs of her jumpsuit, but she stayed unscathed. 

Finally, she reached the end and turned. She caught a glimpse of the two boys inching their way through behind her. Good. Maybe they’d stay there long enough for her to lose them. 

She turned another corner, and- _whack_ \- she collided with someone running from the opposite direction, and they both went down to the floor.

Chell tried to scramble away, almost swung the crowbar- and then realized who it was. It was the little girl from District Six. Somehow, she looked even smaller in her Arena jumpsuit than in her interview dress. She was sobbing, gasping for breath, curling into a ball. Chell inched towards her carefully.

“I- I won’t hurt you,” Chell said, uncertainly. 

The little girl raised her face to Chell’s, tears streaming. Slowly, she pulled her hands away from where she had them pressed to her chest. They were angry, blistered red- badly burned.

“I t-touched them,” she said, in a tiny voice. “They were pretty, but they hurt me. And then they started chasing me.”

She was too young to even know they were dangerous- and they’d punished her childish curiosity. Chell felt a surge of anger in her chest.

“They chased me too,” said Chell, trying to sound confident. “Come with m-“

Chell heard the telltale hum a split second before the lasers activated- right behind her, close enough to feel the heat. The little girl screamed, tore away from her, and ran- down the hallway where Chell had just come from. 

Chell jumped to her feet, running after her. She had only taken a few steps when the whole hall lit up red, a thicker barrier of lasers than she had seen yet. She didn’t stop fast enough, and her left hand skidded across one, sending instant, burning pain up her arm. 

It couldn’t have been a clearer message from the Gamemakers. She couldn’t do a thing as- she realized, horrified- the girl ran straight towards the Careers. 

The two boys emerged from the hallway as soon as the little girl got there. Chell heard her wail as soon as she saw them, looking frantically for an escape. Both of them were striped with burns, but that didn’t stop one of them from plunging his knife into the little girl’s stomach.

Chell let out a strangled scream, barely staying on her feet. The cannon fired. The Career boys turned to her, but the lasers didn’t turn off. They were keeping them separated, for now. They’d gotten their death today.

The Career boys knew what it meant, too- they watched her for a moment, then turned and were gone. Slowly, Chell turned and ran. 

Like the first day, she kept going in the same direction for as long as she could, just trying to put as much distance between herself and anyone else as possible. She focused on running, her feet on the floor, anything but what had just happened.

She barely noticed at first when the Arena started to change. If it had been merely abandoned, where she had been before, this part had been abandoned for much longer. The floors accumulated a film of grime; the lights flickered, yellowish. The walls were peeling and cracking with age.

When the hallway ended in a massive hole, the floor collapsed into a pile of debris sloping down into shadow and steel reinforcement exposed by shorn-away walls, she was forced to stop. Was this the edge of the Arena? 

She thought she could see floor below. It might make a good place to hide, at least until tomorrow- provided she wasn’t crushed by falling concrete, or the Gamemakers chased her out. Gingerly, Chell lowered herself down the hole. She’d expected it to be nearly pitch black at the bottom, given the lack of light coming down from above and it being, well, a hole, but she could see. 

There was illumination down here, she realized- coming from the other side of the pile of debris.

The hole went deeper than she realized- it was like a cave, hidden by the lip of the remaining floor above. There was some kind of glowing white object in the corner, the source of the light- and next to it, a jumpsuited tribute, resting against the wall. A tall boy, with messy dark hair.

“Doug?” she whispered.

He started awake, swung his head to look at her. He blinked- then smiled.

“Chell?”


	3. chapter 3 (the arena, part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another warning for Hunger Games-typical violence/death. This was supposed to be the last chapter of the Arena, but it got too long- so there will be either one or two more chapters.

They crashed into each other’s arms. Chell could feel herself shaking, despite herself; she hadn’t realized how _lonely_ she’d been the past five days, besides being hungry and terrified. Doug was gripping her shoulders hard enough to hurt.

“You’re really here,” Doug said, as they let go. “You’re okay.”

Chell nodded, not sure what else to say. They sat down, next to the light, which- now that she could see it closer- was a kind of oblong, squashed sphere of translucent plastic, glowing softly.

“Have you been here the whole time?” she asked him.

“Yeah. I…kinda fell in, running away from the Cornucopia,” he said. “And then I just stayed. I went out to look for food a few times, but I didn’t have much luck. Wheatley sent me some, though.” He pointed to a small packet of jerky, almost gone, and a water bottle. “And the light, so I could see down here.”

Chell quickly pulled her backpack off and tossed him the packet of crackers. She only had a few left, but she could go looking for more. She felt like she should be annoyed that Wheatley had been helping Doug and not her, but she couldn’t. They probably didn’t have very much in the way of sponsor funds, and it had kept him alive.

Doug’s eyes flicked to the crowbar at her side. Chell knew what he was wondering.

“I didn’t…I was running away from him, and a trap killed him,” she explained. “The boy from Twelve.”

She told him everything that had happened- the boy from Twelve, learning where to find food, hiding in the offices, and, finally, that day’s encounter with the Careers. She started shaking a little, again, when she described the death of the girl from Six.

“I couldn’t do anything,” she said. “I think…maybe they were punishing me. Because I outsmarted their trap- they made me watch.”

“It wasn’t your fault. Whatever they did- they did that, not you,” said Doug.

Chell twisted her hands together- from cold as much as anxiety- and immediately stopped, hissing with pain. She’d forgotten about the laser burns on her hands, and the adrenaline of running away must have staved off the pain until now.

“From when they stopped me from getting to her,” she explained, when Doug reacted with concern. “I touched the lasers.”

“Maybe we can get you some medicine,” he said.

A few hours passed before they heard the anthem. Chell and Doug climbed the debris to peek out into the hall- there wasn’t a ceiling to project on in the cave. The face of the girl from Six appeared before the seal reappeared, then faded away.

_I’m sorry,_ Chell thought. _I wish I could have helped you. I wish you hadn’t been in this Arena at all._

“Chell, look,” said Doug.

About thirty feet down the hall, a ceiling panel was opening. One of the claw-like arms she’d seen lifting the turret-traps away descended, dropping a small silver package. The arm disappeared and the panel closed, leaving the package, which was emitting a soft ringing sound. Chell quickly ran down the hall, retrieved it, and climbed back into the cave.

A sponsor gift- although they were usually sent by parachute. Chell opened the bag to find a roll of bandages and a small tin, which she opened to find salve inside. She carefully massaged some into her hands, and the pain nearly disappeared.

“I guess Wheatley didn’t forget about me after all,” she said.

Chell put another coat of the salve on her hands, then wrapped them in the bandages. Exhaustion was quickly catching up with her. She untied her jumpsuit sleeves and shrugged her arms into them, to keep warm- one sleeve was now above her elbow, the edge of the fabric blackened where the laser had caught it. She lay down on the cave floor and almost immediately fell asleep.

 

*

 

Chell woke in near darkness. She sat up in panic, looking for Doug, before she realized he- and the light- had just moved ten feet or so down the cave wall. Doug was outlined in shadow, sitting cross-legged, facing the wall.

She moved towards him, into the halo of light; when she got closer, she realized that he had a pen in his hand, and he was drawing on the wall with it. The pen didn’t write well on the concrete, only making scratchy, faint lines and dark splotches where the pen leaked; she noticed that his fingers were ink-stained, as well as the legs of his jumpsuit.

“Do you want to sleep?” she said, quietly.

“Well, I had to watch you, now,” he said with a smile. The smile faded, and he stopped drawing for a moment. “I haven’t been sleeping much. When I slept, I had nightmares, and when I didn’t, I…saw things. It happened at home, too, but being here made it worse. The drawing helps.”

“Oh,” she said, not sure how to respond.

“I found the pen when I was looking for food,” he continued. “It doesn’t do much, but…” He shrugged.

Chell picked up the light, holding it up to see a drawing- no, a mural- as high as she was tall. It was a circle made of smaller circles, ten or fifteen of them. He’d scribbled things in and around them, illegible text, numbers. On one side he’d started filling in some of them, in crescent shapes- as rare as it was to see the moon in District Three, she recognized that.

On the other side- where he was working now- he’d started drawing over them with rough intersecting lines, like a star. He’d refined it, over a few consecutive circles, until he’d sketched out a geometric design: a series of diamondlike shapes, interlocked within the circle.

“I forgot, you weren’t in the Advanced Sciences class in school,” he said, when he saw her looking at it, perplexed. “It’s an aperture…it comes from optics.”

He started sketching a rough diagram for her. Chell wondered if this was being cut from the broadcast- the Capitol didn’t like the districts learning about each others’ industries too much.

“A camera has three parts, basically. It’s got the lens- the glass part, that focuses the light- and something inside that captures the light and makes a picture. But you’ve also got to have something in the middle, so you can let the light in when you want to, or else it doesn’t work. That’s the aperture.”

Chell had the strange feeling there was more to it than Doug was telling her, but she didn’t know what.

“Your parents work in the labs,” she said instead. “I didn’t remember you when we got reaped. That’s why.”

“We used to be,” he said, “until they split the classes up.”

“Oh.”

“The labs aren’t as great as people make them out to be,” he said. “The Capitol threatens the lab workers if they don’t make progress fast enough. They’ll take away food, or…worse.”

This definitely wasn’t making the broadcast. “I never thought they sounded a lot better than the factories,” she said. “And there’s no sun.”

“Our houses aren’t down there,” he said, “but when my parents come home it’s usually dark. Unless they have to work through the night.”

“I would hate that. I…I sneak out to the fence to look outside the District. I want to go where you can see the sun. I mean…I wanted to.”

“Well, if you win, you will. Victors get to see all the Districts,” he said.

She didn’t know what to say to that. She’d never thought about that- because she’d never entertained the notion she might actually survive this. And if she won, he lost- he would have to die.

Chell was spared having to answer by a cannon firing, shaking the walls of the cave. She and Doug looked at each other.

“Who was that, do you think?” he said. She shrugged.

Doug moved down the wall a few feet, back towards the entrance of the cave, and started writing something on the wall, in a column. Pairs of letters and numbers- _M1, F1, M2, F2_ \- a tribute chart.

“We should figure out who’s still alive,” he said. He circled _M3_ and _F3_ \- himself and Chell.

“Five Careers,” Chell said, “both from One and Two and the boy from Four. Unless that was one of them.”

“Probably not,” Doug said, in a tone that suggested he wished it had been, circling them as well, and crossing out _F4_.

The beginning of the Games felt like a very long time ago, even though it had only been days. “I think Seven, Ten, and Eleven all died at the Cornucopia,” she said- Doug crossed them out, straight across the row. “I think the girl from Twelve too, and the boy…” Doug crossed them off as well.

“I remember the boy from Six died at the Cornucopia,” he said. “He was the first after the Careers.” He crossed through both in Six, sparing Chell from recounting the previous day again. “I think one each from Eight and Nine, too, but I can’t remember which.”

“The girl from Five died on the first day,” Chell said. “That’s all I know.”

Doug crossed her out too. “So besides the Careers, that’s us, the boy from Five, and one each from Eight and Nine. And one of them just died. So…nine.”

They stared at each other. Only nine. The Games could go on for a while yet, but…both of them were still alive.

Chell ventured out of the cave with the crowbar, a while later, in search of food. She ended up breaking into the biggest room she’d seen yet, with a large table and a tattered projection screen at one end, like the kind they set up in the District square for the Games. There were some crackers and a bottle of water in the corner.

For the first time, Chell wondered what was happening in Three. She hadn’t spared it much of a thought since leaving, honestly- she didn’t have family to worry about, and she only missed it in the sense of wishing she were there, miserable but alive, instead of being a tribute. No one from Three had made it this far since Chell could remember. They usually died at the Cornucopia, maybe made it two or three days. Now they had both, six days in.

She returned to the cave, eating a few of the crackers herself- she realized she hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Doug was sitting in the corner with the light, silent- at first she’d thought he was sleeping, but then he lifted his head to stare into the distance.

“We have to do something,” he said, finally. Chell looked at him, nonplussed.

“Listen. You know how the Games go at this point, right? There’s the Careers, and five of the rest of us. Either we starve or they kill us, and then they fight, and one of them is the Victor. Why?”

“They’ve got the biggest alliance,” she said, “they’re stronger, and they’ve got the weapons and the food.” She didn’t say _and they train for years in their districts and then volunteer_ , even though everyone knew that, too.

“Right. I think we need to do something about that. Do you trust me?” he said.

Chell had no idea what he was thinking. If they went up against the Careers, they would die. But he was right- if they didn’t try, they would kill them anyway.

“I trust you.”

 

*

 

That night, the face of the boy from Nine was on the ceiling- Doug crossed him off the chart. They both ate most of what was left of the food- if the plan went as it should, they would have more soon.

They waited as long as they dared, and then set out from the cave, for the Cornucopia. The plan hinged on the Careers having already left when they arrived. What they would do if they hadn’t, Chell wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure what they were doing at all. Doug wouldn’t tell her exactly what he planned to do once they got there.

Her job was to fill the backpack with food, get them some weapons, and then watch his back, while he…did something. Hopefully they would be gone before the Careers ever knew they were there.

Maybe the Careers wouldn’t be as much of a problem. Even if they were, at least they would have done something.

Somehow, they found the double doors with relative ease. They listened, ears pressed to the door.

“I don’t think they’re in there,” said Chell. Doug nodded, and they pushed through the doors together.

Unlike the last time Chell had seen this room, it was empty and silent. Their footsteps echoed off the vaulted ceiling above. The Cornucopia still stood in the center, piled with supplies, except for the bags and boxes that had been pulled down by the Careers.

Doug pointed at the walkway that ran the circumference of the room. “I think I’m going to need to get up there-“

Before either of them could react, they heard a sound from the other side of the Cornucopia- and someone came out. Chell knew right off it wasn’t one of the Careers- but he did have a spear, which he was pointing at them. Chell tightened her grip on the crowbar.

“You’re from Five,” Doug said, before either of them moved. The boy stopped. Chell noticed that his face had more than a little fear in it. “What are you doing here?”

The boy hesitated before he spoke. “Th…they took me,” he said, “the Careers. On the first day. After they killed my district partner.” She watched his eyes flick between her and Doug.

“Why didn’t they kill you?” she asked.

“To guard their stuff,” he said. “And they think I can figure something out to hijack this place. You know- power district.” He gestured to his shirt.

Doug looked like he was thinking about something very carefully.

“We’re here to ruin their day,” he said. “Want to help?”

Boy Five’s eyes widened, then he smiled. “What’s your plan?”

Chell climbed the metal structure of the Cornucopia with Doug and Boy Five. They found a grappling hook among the supplies, which they tossed and hooked to the walkway railing.

“When you’ve got enough stuff,” Doug said to Chell quietly, as the other boy shimmied across the rope, “get as much as you can off the Cornucopia and near the platforms.”

Chell thought she was beginning to understand what the plan was, even if she didn’t know how he was planning to execute it. She found a few knives, sticking them in her waistband, before grabbing a silver bow and its sheath of arrows, and hurrying down the platform. There was a massive supply of food here- bread, apples, canned food- more than all twenty-four tributes could have eaten, much less five Careers. She loaded the backpack up until any more weight would slow her down, and then started pulling the sacks out to the platforms.

All of the tribute platforms, circling the Cornucopia, had explosives inside. Stepping off the platform before the countdown was over would set them off, blowing the tribute to pieces. It happened every couple of years or so- someone would try to get a head start anyway, or some poor kid lost their balance. She’d never heard of detonating them later, she thought, dropping a sack of apples on a platform. Or having a way to do so inside the Arena itself.

Something still wasn’t adding up, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

Chell glanced up at the boys on the walkway above. They’d pried a panel off the wall with the crowbar, revealing wires and circuitry behind. They could have been cousins- the Five boy was darker-skinned to Doug’s pale, but they had the same skinny frame and dark hair. She picked up the spear that the Five boy had dropped and mounted the platform.

“I think we’re close,” Doug said, his hands submerged in a tangle of wires. “Chell-“

There was a thunderous bang from below. At first Chell thought one of the mines had gone off, but it was worse- the Careers had burst through the doors. The girl from One’s eyes met hers instantly- consumed with rage. Her blond hair, no longer the silky sheet from the interviews, looked shorn off at an angle- by a laser, probably, pursuing her two days ago.

“They’re in our stuff!” shouted the girl from Two. The boys were approaching the platform, weapons ready.

Suddenly, the boy from Five was at Chell’s side. He took the spear from her hand before she could argue.

“I’ll hold them off,” he said. “This is for my district partner.”

He ran down towards the advancing Careers- leaving Chell at the top, alone. The rope was still connected to the platform, but it would take her too long to get across- and the Careers could easily pick her off from below.

“I maybe didn’t think this all the way through,” Doug called to her.

“What?”

“Hold on,” he said. He yanked a handful of wires. A moment passed. Two. She could see him muttering silently- please, please.

All twenty-four platforms exploded with a deafening bang, enveloping the room in fire and debris.

It was several seconds before Chell could pick herself up. The Cornucopia was miraculously still standing, although the impact of the debris had shaken it enough to throw her off her feet. Her ears were ringing, and dark spots were floating in her vision.

She could see Doug similarly shaking himself off, on the walkway. She shouted to him- her own voice sounded distant in her ears. The rope had been blown off the platform in the explosion, but it was still attached on his side. He pointed downwards, then swung himself over the railing and slid down the rope to the floor. The thin metal stairs had been nearly obliterated in the explosion, but there was enough left that Chell could make her way down.

She scanned the wreckage for the Careers, but she couldn’t see any of them in the still-settling debris. For a moment, she wondered if any of them were dead. She doubted they had been that lucky- but if she and Doug were up, they would be soon. She turned back towards the Cornucopia- and her stomach twisted. The Five boy was lying in the wreckage, too still. Whether the Careers had gotten to him or the explosion had, his cannon had probably been lost in the noise. She made another silent apology before following Doug out the doors.

Chell was moving as fast as she could- her head was pounding and the new weight of the food and bow, which she’d managed to hold onto, was throwing her off. She didn’t even know which way the cave was from here. Doug seemed to know, although he looked dazed as well.

“We did it,” he was saying, possibly more to himself than to her. “We crashed the system. It worked.”

For Chell, the next few seconds passed in slow motion. The wall to their right _rippled_ \- at first she thought her dizziness was playing tricks on her eyes. Then the wall itself split into smaller panels and opened up, sliding away into itself. Like the floor panels, for dead tributes.

In the darkness, she could just barely see a line of ovoid figures with bright red eyes.

She dove, grabbing Doug by the back of his jumpsuit and pulling them both to the floor. She heard them fire as she hit the ground- and a pained yell from Doug as he landed nearly on top of her.

Blood was the first thing she saw when she got herself up again- a trail from where they had been standing, to the spreading patch on the leg of Doug’s jumpsuit. He was breathing heavily, face twisted in pain. And before she could even move to help him, she heard the pounding of feet down the hallway, and a figure appeared. It was one of the Career boys- the boy from Two. The one who had killed the girl from Six. He was holding the same knife.

For a moment, she almost thought he was going to walk into the path of the turrets- but the wall folded shut again, just as he approached. That trap had been just for them, to slow them down. Now they were going to let him finish the job, she realized with horror- and anger. They were going to be made examples of.

Chell pulled the bow off her shoulder, nocked an arrow, and fired. Just like the Training Center. Easier- he was only about twenty feet away. The arrow buried itself in his chest, and he fell.

She didn’t let herself look for long. She turned back to Doug. He was still conscious, although she could see how much pain he was in.

“Doug…we have to move,” she said. “We have to get out of here.” As if to punctuate her point, the boy from Two’s cannon fired.

He nodded, face screwing up in anticipation. Carefully, she got his arm over her shoulder and hoisted him to a standing position. He tried to use the other leg, but she was taking most of his weight. Somehow, they managed to walk, slowly. She almost fainted in relief, herself, when she saw the opening of the cave.

As soon as they were safely inside, Chell used one of her new knives to cut away the leg of Doug’s jumpsuit, to see his wound better. She was expecting a bullet lodged in his leg, but it looked more like a knife wound- it must have grazed him. Still, it looked deep and was still bleeding freely- and any open wound was dangerous in the Arena. She cut off the other sleeve of her own jumpsuit and tied it tightly around his leg- the only thing she could remember to do.

She barely managed to lie down before exhaustion overcame her.

 

*

 

When Chell woke, she almost forgot what had happened. She almost forgot she was in the Arena at all. Of course, it quickly came rushing back. _Doug_. She’d passed out without really knowing if he was all right. She quickly sat up, looking for him.

He was in the corner, sitting up against the wall, holding the light. His head was tipped back, dozing. When she pulled herself along the floor towards him, he woke.

“You’re all right,” he said, a look of relief on his face.

“I’m fine- what about you? How’s your leg?” she asked.

“It’s okay, I think,” he said. “Hurts, but it stopped bleeding, mostly.” The jumpsuit leg was fairly saturated with blood, but it didn’t look fresh.

When she looked up, he was still staring at her, with the same expression.

“What?”

“When I woke up…you had all that blood on you…I thought you were dead,” he said. “I thought something happened that I didn’t remember.”

Chell looked down at her own jumpsuit. There was, indeed, a large rust-colored stain down the side of her leg and another on her chest. It had probably gotten on her in the hallway when he’d been shot, and again when she’d carried him back.

“I remember a cannon,” he said. “Did you fight someone?”

“The boy from Two,” she said. “He followed us. I…”

She’d shot him. Killed him. She hadn’t even thought about it. He’d killed the little girl from Six, so had he deserved it? What did that make her?

Doug took her hand and squeezed hard. He understood enough.

“I’m not hurt,” she managed to say, finally. “My head still hurts from the explosion, maybe.” Her ears were still ringing a little.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly.

Chell wanted to ask him how he’d done it. How had he known to pull the wall off the Arena itself and detonate the bombs? He had said something, before- We crashed the system. And then the Gamemakers had immediately tried to kill them.

She noticed a new row of drawings on the wall next to him- less organized than the mural, it looked like a large dark scribble surrounded by smaller shapes and curling text.

“I…wasn’t sure if everything was real,” he said. “I think I saw…a lot more blood. Those things that shot me. I saw that boy from Five…He died. Not just in my head- I was awake for the recap.” His face twisted, unreadable. “The girl from Two died too. In the explosion, I guess.”

Now it was Chell’s turn to hold on to him. It might have been indirect, but three people had still died because of something he’d done- and he’d briefly befriended one of them.

(The news left her reeling for a different reason, too- two of the Careers were dead. They’d killed two Careers.)

“That…happened before you found me, too,” he continued. “I’d see you- here, when you weren’t here. Sometimes you were dead, or dying. Sometimes you wanted to kill me. I didn’t know if you’d want to kill me- some people kill their district partners. It’s not like we were friends before this.”

“I’m not dead,” she said. “And I won’t let anyone hurt you. I’ll die first.”

“…I don’t want you to do that,” he said. “Not for me.”

Before she could respond, a familiar ringing sound echoed down from the entrance of the cave. Chell gave Doug a long look before she jumped up to get the sponsor gift.

The package was strangely large and heavy. They didn’t need food, they’d pilfered enough from the Cornucopia before destroying it, but what else did they need that was this big? She brought it back inside and opened it. The first gift was some kind of medicine in a tube and bandages for Doug’s leg. Chell immediately applied it and dressed the wound as best she could. It wasn’t perfect, but it was covered, which was hopefully good enough.

The second was a set of paints.

“I guess the sponsors want to be able to see my drawings better,” Doug said, examining the two paintbrushes that had come with it.

“I can’t believe Wheatley was even allowed to send that,” said Chell.

“Don’t talk like that,” said Doug, turning his face towards the ceiling. “Thank you,” he said, to whatever camera was watching.

For all Doug’s efforts to subvert the Arena entirely, he was also very conscious of how the Games worked.

They took turns taking naps for awhile. Doug claimed his leg felt better after the Capitol medicine, but it was clear he was still hurting. Chell ate her first decent meal in the Arena, a can of beans and crackers, while he slept. She was reluctant to sleep at all, knowing Doug couldn’t move very well, but conceded when he agreed to keep a knife within reach.

There were no faces on the ceiling that night.

The next day passed much the same way. They rested. Chell spent her time sitting in the entrance to the cave, loaded bow in her lap, waiting if the Careers came hunting for them. They didn’t. The hallway outside stayed undisturbed. Either the Careers were too consumed with their own problems- finding food might be keeping them busy, she thought with a smile- or, somehow, she and Doug were interesting enough to keep around. For now.

Chell took a sleeping shift after the recap- no deaths, again. She woke, as she had for the past few days, to Doug in his spot down the wall, with the light and his paints, working on something she couldn’t quite see. She was sure the cameras could, though. He went to sleep, leaving her alone.

Instead of taking her position at the cave entrance, Chell picked up the light and crept further into the cave, looking at Doug’s paintings. He’d colored in some of the drawings he’d done in pen first, perhaps getting the feel for them- the aperture diagram he’d explained to her was carefully filled in with black. The paints made his drawings look dreamlike, fluid- swirling lines over large swathes of color, messy geometric shapes surrounded by scribbled text, difficult to read in the irregular lines of the brush.

She reached his last painting, and her heart jumped into her throat.

He’d painted her. Not in the style of the others- this one was beautifully realistic, the likeness undeniable. She hadn’t known he could paint this way. He’d drawn her with her arms spread wide, a peaceful expression on her face, eyes closed. She realized he must have watched her as she slept, because she didn’t think she’d ever seen her own face so untroubled. He must have used all the orange he had on her tribute jumpsuit- and around her, the dripping strokes faded into fingerpainted swirls, almost flower-like.

Chell didn’t realize she was crying until she took a long breath and felt the tears spill down her face. Not only had Doug given her the most beautiful gift she had ever- or would ever- receive, he’d done something, yet again, that wasn’t done in the Arena. Tributes weren’t supposed to be memorialized, but Doug had made that impossible. No matter whether she lived or died, now, the Capitol would remember her face.

She turned away from the painting, picked up her bow- being careful not to wake the sleeping boy in the corner, and resumed her position at the cave entrance. She was sure that Doug wanted her to be the Victor- if he didn’t want her to die for him, and he did this for her, he didn’t want to win. The Gamemakers might arrange for his death just for making that painting- as if they didn’t have a reason already. She still hadn’t figured out what he had done at the Cornucopia.

Of course, she knew she wasn’t their choice for Victor either- the Gamemakers had tried to make her just an entertaining kill for the Careers, before she even found Doug. They’d killed the Six girl, just because she was there. The Twelve boy had walked right into the trap too, without a chance to fight. The boy from Two might have been perfectly willing to kill them, but they’d set a trap for him all the same- made _her_ the trap, bet on Chell’s willingness to kill for Doug, and either way they won. They always won.

If the Capitol wanted Doug dead, she thought, watching him from her perch on the debris, then she had to save him. She was already in the Arena, already a tribute, her life was forfeit. Had been forfeit a long time ago. Not only did Doug have a family but- there was something else going on, something she didn’t understand. If he were Victor…

She’d willingly die to get him as far as she could. It was the only thing she _could_ do. The only way to repay him, and a way to make her life and her death mean something.

It had to have been early morning when an unusual sound startled them both- sent Chell’s hands flying to her bow and Doug scrambling out of sleep. The anthem, followed by the Games announcer’s voice.

_“Attention, tributes. Attention. The regulations requiring a single Victor have been suspended. Two Victors may now be crowned if both originate from the same District. May the odds be ever in your favor.”_

Chell and Doug’s eyes met. She was sure the expression of naked shock on his face was mirrored in her own. In seconds, they were embracing, like the first time she found the cave.

“We can both live,” she could hear him breathing in her ear. “We can both live.”


	4. chapter 4 (the arena, part 3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of the Arena, and what comes after.

It only took a few hours before they heard a cannon.

Since the announcement of the rule change, Chell and Doug had both been on high alert. It was still anyone’s game, which, Chell supposed, was the point- the rule change just raised the stakes. Would a pair win for the first time, or would one of the lone tributes kill them all for the crown? The Capitol audience must be going crazy- or maybe they weren’t, which was why the Capitol was doing something so unheard of.

Chell had quickly realized- after the shock had worn off- that the Capitol was setting up another trap for them. They obviously didn’t want either of them to survive. Being one of the remaining pairs put the biggest target possible on their backs- and their competitors were the Ones. If they even made it to a final showdown, there was no way they’d win against them.

It was the Capitol’s punishment for them. Give them hope, and then kill them, painfully, for everyone to see. Chell still hadn’t changed her mind about what she’d decided. She was going to get Doug as far as she could.

She had stationed herself at the cave entrance indefinitely, not worrying about shifts; Doug was organizing what was left of their supplies. When they heard the cannon, they both jumped.

“Who do you think that was?” said Chell.

“Either Four or Eight,” said Doug. He shrugged, his face drawn. “I’m sure the Ones are still together.”

Chell hadn’t seen the girl from Eight at all, wasn’t even sure what she looked like. Somehow she had survived this long alone. If that had been her cannon, either she’d finally been found, or she’d succumbed to hunger or injuries. The Gamemakers wouldn’t have set a trap at this stage, except maybe to lead the Careers to her.

_That could have been me, if I hadn’t found Doug,_ she thought. _Would I have made it this far?_

She could only hope the death of the girl from Eight had been, or would be, quick. Because whoever was left, when the Gamemakers made them fight, she was going to have to kill. Until she and Doug won, or they killed her.

Hours passed. They still weren’t disturbed. Doug made Chell sleep, promising to wake her at the first sign of trouble. She was too on edge to get much rest.

Not long after she woke, another cannon sounded.

The anthem played a few hours later, and showed them the boy from Four and the girl from Eight.

Chell, Doug, and the Ones were the last tributes left.

They waited through the night, anxiously. The Gamemakers could do something to drive them together at any time, now. But if they hadn’t done it immediately, during nighttime mandatory viewing, they’d probably wait until the morning at least.

If night was even night anymore. Chell couldn’t even be sure. She hadn’t seen the sun in nearly two weeks now.

Doug insisted they eat, making Chell eat some crackers and an apple even though she told him she wasn’t hungry.

“We’re going to need the energy,” he said, “and there’s no point in taking it with us.”

They hadn’t spoken much since the rule change. The nerves were getting to both of them. Although Doug was trying to be encouraging, she could tell he had come to the same conclusions she had. Their chances were slim.

“If nothing happens in the next few hours,” Chell put forward, sometime later, “we should start moving.”

Doug nodded. “The Cornucopia?”

“It’s probably where the Ones are. Or they will be.”

They fell into silence again for a while.

“Chell?” said Doug, quietly.

She hummed in acknowledgement, mind spinning.

“I can’t… I just… I need to thank you. Before all this happens.”

Chell whipped her head around to look at him.

“I wouldn’t still be here if you hadn’t found me,” he said. “I’d already be dead. Whether I just starved, or tried to do something on my own… And you didn’t leave, even after I got shot, and-“

“I…”

“And I didn’t forget what you said,” he continued. “You said you’d die before you let them hurt me.”

“Doug.”

“I don’t want you to do that,” he said. “Because I’m going to fight too. And…I’m the one that should die, if I have to. You deserve to go home.”

She stared at him, taken aback.

“Why?” she said. “No one will miss me. You- you have a family.”

“They would understand,” he said. “And that’s not true.”

It took her a few seconds to understand what he was saying. Then she threw her arms around his neck wordlessly.

“We just have to get past the Ones. Then we can go home,” Doug said into her ear. “Both of us. Promise?”

She nodded, although she wasn’t sure either of them could keep it.

They kept waiting for another hour- then two. Chell was far beyond trying to sleep. She felt ready to jump at the first sound. Doug’s eyes were closed, leaning against the wall next to her, but he looked too tense to actually be asleep.

The only warning they got was a distant rumble, like a far-off explosion, the shockwaves passing through them like a shiver.

An earsplitting boom fractured the air, and the entire cave was suddenly shaking violently, throwing them both to the floor and sending pieces of the walls and ceiling down around them. The debris that formed the entrance nearly collapsed under them as they climbed out. They had only just pulled themselves into the hallway above when another shudder took the ceiling down. Where their sanctuary had been- where they had been, minutes ago- was now filled with massive chunks of concrete and twisted metal.

( _Doug’s paintings were in there,_ Chell thought. It wasn’t important, except- it was to her.)

They locked eyes for a moment in agreement- the walls shook with another distant boom- and started down the hall towards the Cornucopia. They walked for awhile in peace, although they could still hear rumbling far away. Were the Ones being routed out, somewhere else? Would the Gamemakers tear the entire Arena apart just to force them together? Chell didn’t doubt that they would try.

She regretted even thinking it, because another explosion rocked the hallway, sending them staggering. Ceiling tiles cracked and rained down around them. The floor shook and didn’t stop.

Chell broke into a sprint, reaching out for Doug behind her. She saw him wincing, running on his leg, but he kept pace with her. Chell turned- and saw the hallway behind them collapsing, as though it were being ripped away by a massive hand. Choking back a scream, she grabbed for Doug’s hand and ran faster.

Somehow, they made it to the double doors of the Cornucopia. They fell through them together, gasping for breath. Chell grabbed for the bow on her shoulder, forcing herself to straighten, scanning the room for the Ones.

The first thing she noticed was that the lights were dimmed, forebodingly so. It reminded her of the rare times Three lost power- the emergency lights were almost worse than nothing, the cold, weak lights casting pools of sickly darkness around. The wreckage from the explosions had been left there; rubble lay in piles around the twisted, broken Cornucopia structure.

Another quake ran through the Arena, shaking fine dust down from the ceiling. The doors on the other side of the Cornucopia slammed open with a bang.

Chell raised her bow, ready to fire. Doug, at her side, pulled out his knife.

The Ones had presumably been hungry for a few days while they chased the remaining tributes across the Arena, and they looked a little worse for wear. The One girl, her burned-off hair now matted with dried blood on one side, stalked towards them, murder in her eyes.

“I’m going to _kill you,_ ” she snarled.

Chell didn’t hesitate- she fired an arrow at her head. The One girl dodged, pulled out a pair of knives, and charged.

Avoiding the One girl’s attacks was difficult, and totally unsuited for the weapon Chell had- the other girl was on top of her, too close to draw an arrow. Chell didn’t dare turn her back on her, so she jumped and lunged to stay out of the reach of her knives, moving backward, trying to gain ground. She kept whipping her head around to look for Doug.

She didn’t look back fast enough- the One girl slashed at her face, and she brought the bow up instinctively to protect herself, but that gave the One girl a chance to get close. In her panic to get away, Chell lost her balance and fell backwards- which saved her from the next blow, the One girl’s knife swiping where her body had been moments before- and she hit the floor, the bow flying out of her hands. She twisted to avoid the knife stabbing into the floor where her face had been, scrambling away backwards- into a wall.

_“Chell, move!”_ she heard Doug shout, although she couldn’t see him. She couldn’t see anything but the One girl advancing with a deadly smile.

She heard a mechanical _whirr._ Doug shouted her name again. She suddenly focused- on the wall behind the One girl, on the apparatus that had appeared high above. Pointed at her.

Chell rolled to the side, throwing herself as far as she could- just as it fired. The One girl turned just in time, diving the other way. The explosive impact- some kind of bomb- rocked the room. Pulling herself to her feet, Chell spotted Doug- on top of the Cornucopia.

Chell ran towards the Cornucopia and started climbing- the Ones had fallen back for a moment, but it wouldn’t take them long to attack again. She was halfway up when she heard a grinding sound above her, and looked up- to see a wall panel, high above, folding away to reveal another missile-firing gun.

She heard it _whirr_ like the other one, and before she could scream for Doug to move, it fired- but it didn’t fire at him- it fired below them, at the Ones. They both fell back, but as the smoke cleared, Chell could see they were both undamaged. It had hit the floor between them.

Something clicked in Chell’s head. They hadn’t hit the Ones- hadn’t even been aiming at them- but they’d shot straight at her. They were trying to make it look fair, but they were just knocking the Ones back. Until they needed them. It was the same strategy as the hallway after they’d blown up the Cornucopia. Take out one of them with the missiles, and then let the Ones have their victory kill.

She’d just made her way to the top of the Cornucopia when she saw Doug take a flying leap off the platform.

He barely made it. She couldn’t believe he made it. She saw him lunge in the air, reach out- and, by his fingertips, grab the railing of the catwalk on the other side. The Ones were grabbing for him below, but he swung his body up and over, falling bodily into relative safety.

Doug got up and started running. Chell followed his path with her eyes- and realized what his plan was. The missile launchers extended from the wall six or so feet above the platform- high, but reachable. Doug was going to try to tamper with it, like he did whatever he’d done to make the mines explode.

The Arena shuddered- and then, to Chell’s horror, the catwalk itself, with a horrible grating, crumbling sound, began to fall. Section by section, it crashed to the floor below- but Doug was ahead of it, just enough to get there in time.

He jumped- and grabbed the ledge just under the launcher, just as the catwalk collapsed underneath him. He reached for something in his jumpsuit- the crowbar, he’d taken it out of the backpack- and swung. It connected with the launcher with a hollow _thwack,_ knocking the barrel to the side. It jerked in its housing with a whine, made a clunky, stuck-gear sound- and fired a missile, almost throwing Doug off and sending the Ones below scattering.

Just barely, over the noise, Chell heard a whirr. She turned, her heart sinking. She expected to see the launcher, the working one directly behind her, the one she’d forgotten about for a moment, pointed at Doug. It was positioned perfectly to hit him- he couldn’t even move without falling ten feet to the floor, which, if the fall didn’t kill him, the waiting Ones would. And then they’d kill her.

That wasn’t what she saw. She was staring straight down the barrel. It was pointed at her.

Chell did the only thing she could think to do, in the second she had to move. She let go of the Cornucopia- she tried to fall into a roll, but the impact still knocked the air out of her lungs. The launcher fired. The missile streaked past where Chell had been moments before- flying straight at where the Ones stood across the room.

Chell ducked, instinctively, to shield herself. The impact made a horrible noise. She heard the One girl scream what had to be the boy’s name, as though from far away. As she pulled herself to her feet, she saw the crater in the far wall of the room, a lot of blood, and the boy’s body. What was left of his body. She nearly stopped breathing when she looked up and saw Doug was no longer dangling from the ledge. Then she saw movement from the remnants of the catwalk above. He must have been thrown by the explosion.

The One girl was making incoherent noises of pain and rage, staring at where her partner lay. Suddenly, she spun, staring at Chell, and lunged.

If avoiding her attacks had been difficult before, it was almost impossible now. She was a tornado of anger and knives. All Chell could do was run. Pain sliced across her shoulder, and she stumbled- turned to see the One girl bearing down on her-

-and then the One girl was howling, stumbling backwards. Trying to shake off Doug, who had jumped her from behind, his hands on her face. Chell saw her stab backwards, and Doug yelled, losing his grip and falling.

She turned on Chell- and Chell punched her in the face, before she had a chance to attack. The One girl went sprawling to the floor.

Chell ran to Doug. He was pressing a hand to a slash across his ribs. As she helped him to his feet, he hissed in pain.

“She just grazed me- it’s my ankle,” he said. “Think it’s broken. I jumped down from up there.”

Before Chell could respond, the biggest tremor yet tore through the Arena, as though something had exploded directly beneath them. Doug clutched her arm to keep from falling; she barely stayed on her feet. Next to her ear, she heard Doug suck in a breath through his nose. Not pain- surprise. She looked up.

The floor on the edges of the room was falling away, and in its place, she could see the flickering orange light and shimmering heat of fire, underneath. As she watched, several rows of tile disappeared, and the One boy’s body on the far side of the room slipped and fell out of sight.

“The Cornucopia,” Chell gasped. “We’ve got to get up there.”

Together, Chell supporting Doug’s weight, they staggered across the room to the structure in the middle. The floor was quickly encroaching around them, filling the room with shadow and smoke, and the temperature was rising. She pushed him up the side of the Cornucopia when they reached it, and, even though he was grimacing in pain, he looked down at her with concern.

“Go,” she said, “right behind you.” He started climbing- there was no time to discuss it. Chell mounted the structure behind him-

-and suddenly the back of her leg was on fire, and she looked down to see the One girl clawing her way up behind her, her bloody knife in her hand. She grabbed her by the quiver slung across her back and pulled, dragging her down.

_“Chell!”_ she heard Doug scream from above, as she felt the knife connect again, slashing her upper arm open- and then the One girl shoved hard, she lost her grip and fell to the floor. The few feet of it left. If she’d rolled, she might have fallen off the edge.

The One girl climbed the Cornucopia as Chell struggled to pull herself up, winded, her arm and leg on fire. Doug, already at the top, injured already- she’d kill him, easily. She hadn’t even bothered to finish her off, like she’d just give up and fall into the flames- not even paying attention to her-

Chell’s arrow went into the One girl’s back.

She pulled herself onto the Cornucopia, just as the last row of tile fell. Doug hauled her over the edge when she got to the top. She saw him scan her, focus on her arm, still bleeding steadily, but she ignored it.

The One girl was still hanging on. Her breaths were rattling gasps. Chell wondered if she’d hit her lung. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

The Cornucopia was an island in the middle of a nightmare, a bottomless pit of fire. It was almost too dark and smoky to see. Surely the Capitol was on the edge of their seats. The One girl wasn’t dead yet.

“Chell,” Doug said, his expression drawn and pale. He was looking at the bow in her hands. She stood- shakily, the wound on her leg was making it difficult to move her foot- and looked over the edge. The One girl was just a few feet below. Their eyes met for a moment- the One girl’s wide with pain and, Chell realized, fear.

Chell fired the arrow into her eye- it was the quickest way to end it that she knew. The girl’s cannon fired before her body even hit the fire below. Chell stepped back and collapsed to her knees, felt Doug breathing heavily, maybe crying, at her side.

The Arena began to change around them; the smoky air was sucked away through invisible vents, the lights flickered on, the floor below rose back into place. Besides the bloody crater in the wall and the half-destroyed catwalk, it was as though nothing had happened.

_“Attention, tributes,”_ the voice of the Games announcer said, echoing in the large, empty space. _“The previous revision allowing two Victors from the same district has been revoked. Only one Victor may be crowned. Good luck- and may the odds be ever in your favor.”_

The ringing silence- and Chell’s own pounding heartbeat in her ears- was suddenly deafening. She’d been right. It had all been a trap- give them hope, let them get to the end. She hadn’t even considered what they’d do if they survived the fight.

Doug was still staring at the ceiling, as though he was waiting on something else, as though he were searching for an answer. His face was white as paper when he looked at her.

“No,” he said. “They can’t- I’m not going to do that. I can’t.”

His eyes shifted to the bow still in her hands, and she knew what the Capitol must be expecting. She was the one with kills to her name. On her hands, whether they counted or not. The Twelve boy, the Six girl, the Two boy, both of the Ones. Doug probably had the Two girl on his list, killed by the mines. She still didn’t understand how he’d done that, and now they meant for her to kill him for it. Punish them both.

She dropped the bow, pulled the quiver off her back, kicked both off the edge of the Cornucopia. They clattered on the ground below.

“No,” she said, in agreement, shaking her head. She couldn’t find any more words.

They sat in silence, shoulder to shoulder. They were both exhausted and injured- she might have fallen asleep on him, if she hadn’t been terrified. She jerked her head up when she heard an unfamiliar sound- a hissing from above. There was a greenish gas leaking into the room, through the ceiling tiles.

_“Attention, tributes,”_ said the announcer again. _“Exposure to neurotoxin gas will result in death in approximately five minutes. Again- there can only be one Victor. May the odds be ever in your favor.”_

They looked at each other in horror. It was filling the room quickly.

“What are they _doing?_ ” Doug said, weakly. “They have to have a victor.”

Did they care? Had they rejected the idea of allowing either of them to win at all? Had they stepped so far out of line, they had to send a message to the whole country? Surely it was a ploy. They wanted one of them to panic, act without thinking.

Chell was panicking- trying to figure out how to die first, how to get Doug out. To do what she had told herself she would do. She could throw herself off the Cornucopia, hope the fall broke her neck- a fast death, so they’d declare him Victor and pull him out…

Doug shaking her shoulder brought her back. From the look on his face, he could tell what she was thinking.

“Chell, no, listen,” he said, “we promised we’d go home together, remember?”

“But-“

He squeezed her hand, looking her in the eyes. “Do you trust me?”

She nodded. The last time he’d said that, he’d had a plan. The look of determination in his eyes told her he had another one. They looked at each other a long time- the last time- and then he pulled her into an embrace. She could feel his hands shaking against her back.

Chell didn’t know if she was dizzy from fear or if the gas was starting to work, if she was dying. She didn’t let go of Doug- she would hold on to him for as long as she could. Stay with him, if they were both going to die. She was keeping time by his jagged breaths against her shoulder.

_“Ladies and gentlemen,”_ she heard, as if from some distant place, _“I give you the Victors of the 74th Hunger Games, from District Three…”_

Chell opened her eyes to see the room flooded in blinding light. A deafening drone surrounded them, from a hovercraft far above- its engines whipping the air around them, throwing dust and debris, sucking the poison gas from the room. She didn’t remember letting go of Doug, but somehow they got onto the ladder together.

Just before they pulled them onto the hovercraft and she lost consciousness, she thought she saw a fragment of bright blue sky.

 

*

 

When Chell woke, she was staring at a white ceiling. For a moment, she forgot where she was- she thought she was still in the Arena. She couldn’t move her body, and she felt light-headed.

As the fog in her head cleared, she realized that the light was too bright, too warm to be the Arena. She was lying in a hospital bed, in a small, white-walled room. In the Capitol. She turned her head- to see Rick in a chair next to the bed.

“Well, hello there, pretty girl,” he said, with the most genuine smile she’d ever seen on him. “Good to see you among the livin’.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but her throat was too dry. She swallowed and tried again. “Doug-“

“He’s just fine,” Rick said. “Wheatley’s with him. We’ve been takin’ turns watching you two.”

She took a deep breath. She felt tired, sluggish from whatever drugs were in her system, but she didn’t hurt.

“I’ll let them know you’re up,” Rick said, standing, “see if they can bring you some food.” A door slid open and closed behind him. Chell wondered when their off-putting escort had become so fond of them.

They did bring her something to eat- water and what she was pretty sure was potatoes, bland but filling. Sometime later, they brought her clothes and took the tubes hooked into her off, and a Capitol attendant escorted her to an elevator. Her head spun in mild panic for a moment when they rose into the lobby of the Tribute Center. The hospital was underground. She never wanted to be underground again.

The doors opened on the District Three floor, and Craig was waiting for her.

“Wheatley’s helping Doug get ready,” he explained, at the questioning look on her face. “You’ll see them both at the closing ceremonies, in a few hours.”

She’d forgotten about the closing ceremonies. The airing of the official cut of the Games, and then receiving the crown from the President. She took a shaky breath. She wasn’t going to be alone. She was going to have Doug. It was going to be okay.

Her prep team did her makeup, her hair, and her nails, and then Craig brought her dress. It was made of a light grey satin- sleeveless and tight around the middle, fastened with a row of tiny buttons down her back, then falling in floaty ruffles to the floor. Her hair was in an elegant updo, fastened to the back of her head with silver, sparkling pins.

(She also noticed, for the first time, that her Arena injuries were gone. The cuts on her arm and shoulder the One girl had given her were no more than fine white lines, and the burn on her hand was gone too.)

Craig helped her dress- in silence. Before the Games, he’d never stopped talking. Chell felt her stomach twist in knots, and it wasn’t nervousness for the ceremonies. Something was wrong.

“Thank you for the dress,” she said, when he was done. “Thank you for everything.”

“I…had something else planned for you,” he said. “Something—“ He stopped himself, eyes darting. “The President made a special request for the ceremonies. It’s not uncommon. Of course, I couldn’t say no to her.”

“Oh,” she said- as another wave of apprehension washed over her. Why did the President care what she was wearing?

Craig escorted her into the hall before she had a chance to ask. He opened the door for her- and Wheatley was waiting at the elevator. She flung herself into his waiting arms.

“You were brilliant, love,” he said, into her hair. Like the hug before the hovercraft to the Arena, his arms went all the way around her middle. Probably more so, now- she’d lost weight.

“Why isn’t Doug here?” she said, as soon as they let go. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine, he’s fine. They want you to see each other for the first time on the stage. Big reunion, and all, good television,” said Wheatley, but she didn’t miss his hands twisting together, so hard they were turning white.

They rode the elevator down to the first floor (not lower again, she was thankful for). The lobby was a swarm of activity- the stage was set up in front of the Tribute Center, like the interviews. She hadn’t seen this many people since before the Arena. She could feel her hands quivering. She was about to go out there in front of the whole country and the President, and Doug was going to be there but it was still too much.

“…It’s all going to be fine, it’ll be over before you know it,” she heard Wheatley saying, through the blood pounding in her ears. “Come here, one more hug.”

She felt Wheatley’s arms around her again- holding much tighter than before- and suddenly, his voice in her ear was very close and very clear.

“I don’t want to alarm you, love, but we are in some pretty hot water, here,” he hissed, very fast. “The Capitol did _not_ mean to let the two of you survive, but they ran out of options, and the President is _not happy._ ”

Chell froze. Wheatley sounded scared- not his usual anxiousness, but seriously afraid.

“You have to tell them you did everything to protect him,” he continued. “That’s all you wanted. You couldn’t stand the idea of living without him.”

At first, she didn’t understand what he was trying to say. Of course she’d protected Doug in the Arena- she’d been ready to die for him to go home. Then she realized what Wheatley had just said. The Gamemakers really had been trying to kill them, for what Doug did. And whether they’d meant to or not, they’d shown them up again, at the end. Had that been Doug’s plan? Had he guessed they would change their minds?

Whatever the Capitol thought they had been trying to do, she and Doug had to convince them that they had only done it to get home together- in the end, they’d cared more about their friendship than being Victors, or even living. Which was its own form of rebellion, but not as much as blowing up the Arena.

Wheatley let her go, giving her a watery, encouraging smile as he stood- like he’d been giving her a heart-to-heart talk. The Capitol techs swept her away before she could say anything to him.

In what felt like minutes, she was on the stage, and Doug was on the other side, and she ran to him and he met her with a crushing hug. The cheer from the Capitol crowd was deafening. Every spotlight was on them, blindingly bright. She could feel him pressing his face into her shoulder, just like she was burying hers in the front of his jacket. Some part of her hadn’t believed they had really both made it until now.

When they finally broke apart, Gregarius Clark was there- with his too-bright stage smile- to guide them to their seat on the stage. He helped her with her skirt on the steps, since she wasn’t letting go of Doug’s hand on her other side.

The lights went down and the Games reel began. Chell leaned into Doug’s side, and she felt him squeeze her hand harder.

The reapings, the parade, the interviews- and then the Arena. The Careers got lots of screen time, at first, to set up for their eventual confrontation, and since they were doing most of the killing at that point. Doug found the cave on the second day; they cut most of Chell’s wandering and sleeping, focusing on her encounter with the Twelve boy, nearly being caught by the Careers, and the laser trap. They showed the death of the little girl from Six up close.

The focus quickly shifted to them once they found each other. They went to the Cornucopia, and showed Doug and the boy from Five talking, but their tinkering with the panel was completely cut out. It’s portrayed as though however they re-activate the mines, it’s somehow done off camera- or even as though the Five boy had already set it up, since he died minutes later in the explosion.

Their recovery was mostly skipped through, although Doug got a montage of paintings; judging by the audience reaction, especially to the mural of her, this was popular in the Capitol. The Ones were shown licking their wounds and vowing revenge. The rule change was announced; the Ones hunted down the rest of the field. The Arena collapsed, pushing them all to the Cornucopia.

They glossed over the reversal as much as possible, even though it was meant to be the climax. They just showed them holding onto each other on the platform, and the hovercrafts came. Chell was already unconscious by this point, but there was a shot of Doug struggling as they were pulled apart, before passing out himself.

The lights came back up, the anthem began, and everyone rose. The President mounted the stage, wearing a white suit, her pale hair coiled on her head. An attendant behind her carried their crowns- twin thin, silver bands.

Her expression was impassive, almost contemptuous, as she placed Doug’s crown on his head. He didn’t smile. As she stepped in front of Chell, their eyes locked. Close up, they were bright amber and sharp as knives. Chell didn’t dare look away as the President crowned her as well.

 

*

 

There were still days of post-Games events before they were allowed to go home. A banquet at the President’s mansion, a final interview, more parties for the sponsors. Rick shuttled them around to everything- Wheatley, too, who was getting just as much attention as they were. They barely had time to sit down, much less be alone. That didn’t bother Chell too much at the moment, since she didn’t want to let Doug out of her sight, and Doug seemed inclined to the same. They barely let go of each other through it all.

Everyone wanted to talk to Doug about his art- he’d had a following from early on, when he was scratching out patterns with a broken pen on the cave wall. People brought prints of his paintings, from stills of the Games footage, for him to sign. The painting of her was exceedingly popular- evidently, the moment she’d found it had been a highlight of the Games, and had gained them a lot of supporters.

Chell’s role, to their Capitol fans, seemed to be Doug’s quiet, devoted protector. Since that was exactly the role Wheatley had told her to play- and exactly where she wanted to be anyway- she was fine with that. She couldn’t help but feel like they had escaped only to be thrown back into a new Arena. And if it wasn’t over- if Doug was still in danger- she’d keep protecting him.

It didn’t escape Chell’s notice, either, that Craig kept dressing her in grey and white- and Doug too. They were a matched pair everywhere they went, standing out amongst the colorful Capitolites. Especially since bright, painterly splashes of color seemed to be a new trend.

Grey and white, like the walls of the Arena in Chell’s nightmares. She doubted it would ever leave.

Finally, they were on the train for District Three. There would be new houses waiting for them in the Victors’ Village when they arrived. Doug’s parents would be allowed to live with him; Chell guessed she’d be alone in hers. They’d be neighbors with Wheatley now. He’d disappeared as soon as they’d gotten on the train. She didn’t blame him.

She found Doug at the back of the train, staring out a window. They were still in the desert outside the Capitol. She climbed onto the wide seat next to him. There were so many questions she wanted to ask him, about the Arena. But it wasn’t safe yet, not here, and there was time.

“We’re going home,” she said, quietly.

He didn’t respond for a moment, as though he were so lost in thought he didn’t hear. He blinked, then looked at her, reaching out to cover her hand on the seat with his.

“Yeah,” he said.

They sat in silence for awhile, watching the mountains slowly disappear and the open fields spread out around them.

 

-the end-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the wait. there will be (eventually) a catching fire/mockingjay AU sequel- i left a lot of loose ends on purpose.  
> (also made some small edits to chapter one. thought of a capitol name for greg.)  
> thanks for reading!


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